Big Sugar Paid Harvard to Say that Sugar is Healthful
by Dr. Gabe Mirkin
drmirkin.com
My faith in several of my Harvard mentors during the 1950s and 1960s has been shattered by an article that appeared this week in JAMA Internal Medicine (September 12, 2016). Cristin E. Kearns, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF, discovered letters in the archives at Harvard, the University of Illinois and other libraries showing that from the 1960s onward, the sugar industry paid respected researchers at Harvard to write that sugar is not harmful. This incredibly-well-documented research took many hours of sorting through old letters and memos to prove that the sugar industry paid for Harvard's support. To this day, North Americans are fatter and at increased risk for diabetes, heart attacks and some cancers, in part due to recommendations paid for by the sugar industry through research grants to Harvard and other universities.
The Bombshell Showing Collusion between Big Sugar and Harvard
In the 1940s, Fred Stare, chairman of nutrition at Harvard's School of Public Health, began soliciting food companies to donate unrestricted funds for research and education.
In the early 1950s a noted researcher at the University of Minnesota, Ancel Keys blamed saturated fat and dietary cholesterol for the ever increasing rate of heart attacks, obesity and diabetes in North America, while John Yudkin at Cambridge University in England published extensively that sugar, not saturated fats and cholesterol, was responsible for this epidemic. Researchers from other universities, including Harvard, took up the debate and the war between the two factions continued for decades. Now we learn that the debate was fueled with payments to researchers by the sugar industry to prove that Yudkin was wrong. Yudkin died in 1995, still considered by many people to be a quack. The JAMA article, which was reported on the front page of the New York Times (September 12, 2016), shows that Yudkin was on the right side all along.
Dr. Kearns discovered that in 1965, John Hickson of the Sugar Research Foundation (now the Sugar Association) wrote to Harvard researchers asking them to write an article showing that sugar was safe and healthful. He paid them $6500 and asked them to review only the research papers favorable to the sugar industry. Harvard's Dr. Mark Hegsted wrote to Hickson, "We are well aware of your particular interest . . . and will cover this as well as we can." As the Harvard researchers wrote their review of the causes of diabetes and heart attacks, they sent each draft to Hickson, who responded, "Let me assure you this is quite what we had in mind, and we look forward to its appearance in print." Dr. Hegsted and Dr. Stare submitted their paper to one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, stating that the data implicating sugar as a cause of heart attacks was extremely weak and that saturated fat and cholesterol were the actual causes (N Engl J Med, 1967 Jul 27;277(4):186-92). They wrote, "Sugar does not have a unique role in heart disease," even though they had previously published articles associating both fat and sugar with increased risk for heart attacks. Nowhere in the article did they reveal that they were paid by the Sugar Research Foundation. The New England Journal of Medicine did not begin to require financial disclosures until 1984.